Recent research reveals that 68% of searches begin with a search engine, especially Google. Therefore, search engine optimization is the need of the hour. It is the most affordable way to optimize your websites for a long duration and rank your digital businesses up to the apex. But there are multiple things that can hurt your SEO efforts and rankings. Taking the help of duplicate content is one of the things that can harm your website the maximum.
Table of Contents
Do you know what is duplicate content is and why having duplicate content an issue for SEO? Stay connected with us as this blog post discusses this subject of discussion in detail and provides solutions for duplicate content as well.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is information that is available on the internet on more than one site. That ‘one site’ is a location with a specific website address (URL). So, the content present in more than one place is duplicate content.
In other words, duplicate content is also material that is the same in both meaning and presentation, existing in different locations. Moreover, “Duplicate Content” also consists of information that is like the other content even though it’s written with different words.
Two Different Types of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content includes two types available on different domains.
- Internal duplicate content
Internal duplicate content is content a user generates using different internal URLs existing on the same website.
- External duplicate content
External duplicate content (another name is cross-domain duplicates) comes when more than one domain has an identical page copy analyzed and indexed by Google or any other search engine.
Why Duplicate Content Hurts SEO Rankings
Google and other search engines advise users to stay away from duplicate content. It recommends people write original content as taking the help of duplicate content ruins their hard-earned SEO efforts as well as rankings.
Duplicate content is problematic as it complicates Google about which website to promote. The search engines can’t decide whether to lead link metrics to a single web page or to all other versions of the site. Also, duplicate content confuses search engines about what to insert and what to remove from the index.
There exist flaws in this system. When there is a great amount of duplicate content on a website or the web in general, search engines’ algorithm gets disturbed, and they sometimes rank the wrong page instead of the right one. This activity makes SERP results less accurate. Resultantly, it makes users angry, hurts the website’s overall traffic, and soars up the bounce rates.
Free Technical SEO Audit
How Duplicate Content Happens on a Website
There are so many reasons for content duplication on your site, and perhaps you don’t have any idea about it. It’s easy to copy and paste the content for different web pages. But you must write a new and unique copy; otherwise, the search engine crawlers will never rank your content in response to a good search. In addition to copied content, there may have some other reasons for content duplication. Have a look!
-
- Multiple URLs for the same page
- HTTP and HTTPS page versions
- www. and non www. page versions
For illustration, let’s take an example of a website with multiple landing pages for different geographical locations. The person who prepares the copy might believe it’s fair enough to paste the same document and just edit the name of the targeted state. This process seems to be convenient, but it will make your site crowded with the content available on different web pages. So, this will make content duplicate and hurt your hard-earned SEO rankings.
What Will Happen If Your Site Has a Duplicate Content?
The following few things will happen on your website if you have duplicate content on different web pages of your site:
- It decreases website traffic, leads, and sales
- It decreases the SEO rankings of your website
- Your unhappy users will search more about your topic, like product descriptions
Do you want to avoid the above scenarios? If yes, write original and new content for every page of your website. In case your website is hurt by duplicate content, it’s not too late. You can always connect with our SEO services and consultants will guide you with the best possible solution. Your proactive approach and duplicate content will not do wonders for your website; well, it will only demolish the foundations of your digital marketing efforts.
How To Check If the Content Is Duplicate or Not
If your website has content-heavy web pages, but you have been experiencing a sharp decline in your SEO rankings, you need to check your content and see if it is a duplicate or not. Following are a few ways to check for content duplication.
- Exact-Match Search
Copy some text from any web page of your site and put it in quotation marks. After this, Google your content to see if it produces any results. Google will only display the result that contains the same phrase if you search for any query under a quotation mark. If that query turns up different search results, it means your content has plagiarism and has been used on various platforms.
- Plagiarism Checking Tools
There are many free and paid plagiarism-checking tools available on Google. We recommend you use any of the paid tools like Grammarly Premium, Copy Scape, etc. It costs a few pennies but will help you check content duplication and boost your search engine rankings a lot.